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Product description

Product description

TURIN BRAKES Ether Song (2003 UK 12-track CD picture sleeve. The second album from the Mercury Music prize nominated band including the singles Long Distance and Pain Killer (Summer Rain) CDSOUR054)

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Ether Song is the follow up to Turin Brakes' critically acclaimed The Optimist. As leading lights of the much vaunted New Acoustic Movement, Turin Brakes were one of the bands that took on the unenviable task of making quiet, faintly nostalgic acoustic guitar music appeal to a young audience that, rightly, should want anything but. However, their debut LP, The Optimist had a certain soulful promise that ensured it appealed more to the post-clubbing than the pipe-and-slippers crowd, and its follow-up, the sturdy Ether Song builds on its predecessor with added clarity of purpose. Now, South London duo Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian have chosen to bolster their fragile acoustic core with a slightly more robust instrumentation: drums beaten rather than brushed, vibrant piano motifs to flesh out the languid strum, and even--gasp!--the odd electric-guitar solo. They still fall for clichés with a slightly depressing regularity: "Summer rain / Dripping down your face again", they duet on "Pain Killer"--the sort of lyrical profundity that should really be left to Bryan Adams. But there is real content here: "Panic Attack" holds a hint of the peculiar Englishness of Syd Barrett, while the shiversome "Long Distance" stands out as the finest song Turin Brakes have yet written, a grandiose treatise on obsession spattered with electronic laser-bursts and borne out by a piano coda of weighty epic stature. --Louis Pattison

Turin Brakes' last album, The Optimist LP, was something of an unexpected success for a twosome who do little publicity, don't have Hollywood girlfriends and haven't sold their music to advertisers. Many of the reviews struggled to pinpoint exactly what the extraordinary USP was of a guitar band writing poignant, lyrical melodies - hardly groundbreaking stuff, after all, and not a million miles from Travis, Coldplay et al. But somehow their particular brand of sweping emotionalism, folksy vocal harmonies and original songwriting added up to more than the sum of its parts, and The Optimist LP quite rightly collected accolades left, right and centre.So now comes the 'difficult' second album, and for fans of Turin Brakes' first it may be a little disappointing. The layered, sweeping, studio-produced heartstring-tugging melodies are more or less absent, save from Long Distance (released as a single for that very reason), making way for a less polished, sparser sound on many of the tracks, some of which are positively cheery (think Flowers in the Window as opposed to Writing to Reach You). And indeed the boys say that's the sound they were going for, recording many of the tracks in only a couple of takes.There's less of the Thom-York-esque cracked heartbreak and a little more of the slightly bizarre lyrics (singing 'now there's a river!' to yourself at top volume in the car can feel a little odd, however wildly emotional the track feels).Ether Song is by no means a major disappointment, and shows the band exploring new sounds and moving forward. But it may be that in trying not to become bogged down in the same old sound, as Travis have, they have lost sight of the moving, emotional honesty that made their first album so extraordinary.

Following the critical and commercial success of their debut, Turin Brakes were always going to have the ‘difficult second album’ cliché to struggle against. Whilst this is not a massive disappointment, it doesn’t deliver their full potential. They haven’t managed to do a ‘Coldplay’ here by truly eclipsing their earlier work, but they too have the imagination and talent to progress, where lesser bands would meerly deliver that tried-and-tested formula. They’re taking risks and moving on from that safe ground, not everything is bound to work.‘The Optimist’ was produced when the pressure was off, as they’ve said in their own words, when they were writing music they liked, and merely hoped that a modest number of others might enjoy too. It succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, smashing their modest sales projects and garnering a host of critical nods.If there’s a fault then with ‘Ether Song’, it’s that in getting themselves a producer and decamping to LA for a while, the album occasionally suffers from audible over-production. Their sound has grown less subtle, evolving into a something more confident than before. Sometimes it works well, as they deliver lines and chords dripping with emotive power, sometimes it just sounds like, well, they’re trying too hard with this brash new attitude.‘Painkiller’ is the undoubted highlight, and one of the best things they’ve done. It can confidently be held alongside gems like ‘The Road’ from their first album. ‘Falling Down’ and ‘Self Help’ show how they’ve evolved, maintaining that great ear for melody whilst working in some delicate electronic rhythms against their own endearing strumming. On ‘Long Distance’ and ‘Little Brother’ they go further than ‘Mind Over Money’ ever did, bordering on forging what could be termed a brand-new ‘thrash-accoustica’ sub-genre as they deliver with real gusto, managing to tread just the right side of pretentiousness.‘Ether Song’ will hopefully establish Olly & Gale as one of the UK’s most promising bands, and it’s a solid enough platform to work onto what I’m sure will be greater things. But I’m still confident that these guys are one’s to watch – optimistic that their best is yet to come. Hopefully next time round they’ll have less critical pressure on their minds, and they’ll be able to recapture that carefree spirit that still flickers throughout their work, and was in residence throughout the first album.

If the right tracks get chosen as singles, this could do for Turin Brakes what The Man Who did for Travis. A week after release, it’s already sounding like an album of the year contender, a record that will reach far beyond fans of The Optimist LP and achieve nationwide ubiquity.They have pulled off the difficult trick – make a record that sounds larger and more confident than the debut, without sacrificing the intimacy or the tunes to inflated ambition. Ether Song is a long succession of highlights, one you can just play from beginning to end and where each track goes perfectly with the next, but Stone Thrown, Made of Stars, Rain City, and the hidden title track are high water marks of the achievement here. Lyrically, vocally, and melodically addictive, this album is going to be around for a long time.